event tag cloud

Quite surprisingly, I’ll attend the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 in Eastern
Germany. This is a happenstance, I managed to get fast transportation (via
my boss) and accomodation (in a hotel). I will try to help staffing the booth of
Debian this time (so I cannot be called Traitor any longer). Schedule,
due to the spontaneousness of this, no, though. I may not even be there on
Sunday, dunno…

No RCBD (or night) though, some real life and a new release (with fix of
an FTBFS-on-hurd-i386 bug) though:
RMD160 (/MirOS/dist/mir/makefs/makefs-20100306.tar.gz)
= f65bd8ef5cf3306a9112587dd4915b6255e479fe
This version pulls in NetBSD® changes (Acorn Archimedes support, for one),
but I’ve also coded support for boot-info-table (J�rg compatible), as well
as setting the PVD dates (used by GNU GRUB 2 for “UUID”s).

On MirBSD, cdio(1) can now be used to burn (TAO) and blank (quick) CD-RW
media (I backported some OpenBSD changes) too.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R39b has
been released. This upgrade is strongly recommended for everyone. While
being a stable series release there are, due to standards compliance and
bug fixes, a number of caveats
users should be aware of when upgrading. Also new, the list of full terms and conditions applying
to it. Users (and distributors intending to support mksh for their own
customers) should definitively read the caveats, although only corner
cases are incompatible (ask for details).

The kwalletcli page has been
completely written by now. I'm proud to announce the availability of
the CLI for the KDE Wallet, as distfile, as Debian squeeze/sid package
(it's already in testing, yes), and as Debian lenny package, soon to be
in backports (currently only in my own play repo, as I'm waiting for bpo
upload rights – apparently, my PGP key wrecked the software).

I would like to apologise for the delay; I've been more-than-busy at
first (preparing MirBSD for FOSDEM), then in foreign countries where people talk in
weird tongues, then ill. I'm still not totally recovered, and there
is also much catching-up work to do.

FOSDEM was a great success. Once more, thanks to Daniel Seuffert,
Marius Nünnerich and the others from the AllBSD project. We distributed
400 CDs with the latest snapshots, of which about 350 were distributed
on Saturday alone. There was a stronger demand for French flyers
compared to the last years; I think that more locals (i.e. Belgians)
attended the conference. Many of these people were only there on one of
the two days.

Kudos also to the people from the Debian booth (especially Axel
“XTaran” Beckert) for lending us a screen for the showcase computer.
Due to communication problems, the others had not brought a spare
screen as usual, and I could not bring one on the plane.

I held my talk about Build Systems with autoconf, automake and
libtool on Sunday at noon, with a very interested public who posed
some very concrete question. I conclude that there is a real need for
this kind of “HOWTO”. I will write a bit more on the subject of
autotools, in the meantime the slides are available
at SlideShare, where you can view the presentation online (Flash
required) or download
a PDF.

Oh, and contrary to “popular” belief, the food at the Pakistani (!)
restaurant on Saturday was excellent :).

There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info
page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to
subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or
end-users (hosted project developers/users) though).

At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing
for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh – the MirBSD Korn Shell etc.

There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of
the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.)

The MirOS Project will have a booth at FOSDEM 2010, business as usual.
If you thought otherwise, you’re crazy ☺

I know I should write a wlog entry about the BSP, write more, release mksh R40, fix the TaC of it and the kwalletcli webpage (thanks again, it’s
now in Debian sid!) etc.pp but I also need to prepare an ISO for FOSDEM, etc.
Heck, I should prepare a talk for FOSDEM, but I’m not going to. If I need to
stand there and talk, I’ll talk, not hold a presentation. I’ll just see what
people are interested in, talk about The MirOS Project, and improvise.

I’m busy, and there’s only so much computing you can do in a day. This
does include the dayjob. At least, my NMUs are in Debian now and probably
can help people (and I submitted info about other bugs too).

Anyway, watch the news in the months to follow… can’t talk about everything
now.

We're going to FOSDEM 2010 (of
course – I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM,
Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects
of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will
be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy
format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously
huge code, stolen from NetBSD®) and other improvements (albeit less than
I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first FusionForge
meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is
also my first time in France (outside of the Elsaß). People, make a good
impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-)

This
weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have
some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...)
and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I
almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling
from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our
apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side
note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!)

Please don't laugh at this excuse
for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE
Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix
release 2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a
port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus
it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows® Mistda is
worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed
to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny
backports; my WTF
*.deb repo will hold them until then.

There are more webpages I need to fill in...
mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and
BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and
its plugins and patches, ...

Not just Mac
OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also
Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works
quite well – although I need to find out how to make a hardlink
so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I
wrote an mksh package in a garage project,
which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu
integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of
the three.) We also have «lewellyn:#ksh» making a package
for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading
Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not
mean I endorse any of these – right now, I'd probably get the
most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.)

English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native
speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is
not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7
in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still,
they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is
allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've
ever seen by far!)

There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it
anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup
of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with
a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had
was cassis-créme) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.

I finally have a wristband for 26C3. The wristband is what is
controlled on the entrance. I had preordered the ticket and paid by
bank transfer, and the receipt with the barcode only arrived on
december 25. In earlier years, you came on the 26th, crashed in the
hackcenter, and at some point, when there were only ten people in the
queue at the cash desk, you got your ticket easily.

Well, this year, things were a little different. First, there was a
semi-public ticket presale. What's more, rumors about a very limited
number of tickets were floating around. And finally, while the cash
desk was said to open at 2000, the software was not ready by then (!)
and the opening was deferred to 2130. The "fast line" cash desk for
people with presale tickets was only opened around midnight, when I had
already given up hope and joined the huge queue of several
hundred desperate hackers. (Thanks, btw, to ScottyTM for pointing out
that the "fast line" had been opened.) Finally, I was told that my
ticket "did not exist in the system", that I was an evil cracker for
trying to enter with a fake ticket, and that I should check back on the
27th. Great.

The end was happy and somewhat anticlimactic: I checked back this
morning, there was no queue, and my presale ticket was accepted without
any problem. Most of the talks I saw today were about network
neutrality, censorship and related topics. I found the talk
by Jérémy Zimmermann from La Quadrature du Net
especially interesting. Part of the talk was an introduction to
lobbying: calling your EuroParl representative, sending e-mails and
insisting on your point "raises the political cost of certain
decisions".

The snapshot
has another bug I discovered after converting my laptop to a showcase:
lynx(1) charset defaults, after disabling auto-detection, to the wrong
one (the news item has been updated, again).

I came back from OpenRheinRuhr,
and (apparently in contrast to many others) liked it, save for the (a)social
event, which some organisers admit hasn't been what was promised to them. My
hotel was actually some kind of Vereinshaus
and Billard club, so I had to eat supper (after fleeing the Casino, I had
wanted to eat with some others deciding to split/fork, but formorer couldn't
decide, so I walked the 3km, but didn't find anything appealing on the way,
since I walked towards the outside of the city) in a smokey bar. So 2007,
that. But I watched some kind of Billard competition during that, the meal
was good and much, and the beer good and rather affordable. (I even took a
Krug to my room with me to flee smoke.)
Breakfast was included, the quality much more than I had expected at that
price (I paid almost twice that in Basel, where I didn't even have a private
loo adjourning the room, much less a proper bathroom with douche). The city,
despite confusing it with other Ruhrpott
cities beginning with BO, was nice and quiet (although the visitor
count suggests that it was too remote, I rather prefer this to the usual
rush and street mob, and it was still lively).

I think you'll find more coverage, photographies (hopefully not of me,
as I wore a pullover forbidding it) and opinions on the 'net soonish, even
dissing if I may harbour a guess (not without reason, from what I've been
told privately), and, as I still have a headache (as usual...) I refrain
from writing more. The MirBSD^H^H^HGRML CDs will be distributed
at 26C3 by formorer from the Grml team *grins and I wonder if the
celebrities equipeed with a MirCD or MirUSB stick, like Werner Koch, will
make good use of it ;-)

OpenRheinRuhr
will see our latest
snapshot on CDs (although we seem to be short of flyers ☹). Complete,
with MirOS BSD (i386, sparc; i386 Live) and MirGRML (i386).

The next snapshot’s codename has been decided upon angrily today: “wtf
is with allthesebugs?”Expect
a fix for the latter sometime soon, it does in fact have more effect than
most sites say, to avoid Panikmache
(unlike that Schweinegrippe stuff);
I’m lucky my online banking stuff keeps SIDs in the URI ipv Cookie, but
still… very bad. Switching renegotiation off as a quick würgaround also
is evil, for example, my SMTP setup (using X.509v3 SSL certificate auth
for relaying) might break. But we are said to expect an amended SSL/TLS
protocol soon, hopefully with OpenSSL patch.

ekeyrng is
a very rough draft (shell prototype) currently driving, together with a
small USB backport, a Simtec
EntropyKey in herc into wrandom(4) (for now). Really, the
Lua tools should be used, but this is good for the installer, although
the TPM, eKey
and truerand – cprng(8) – functionality should be combined into one small,
efficient, C dæmon doing so (but without the hacks to keep cprng(8) within
one memory page to cease swapping). Still, it’s great!

Does this match what you’re thinking? Well, there is a new
MirOS snapshot, with several components, (as usual) out on BitTorrent. It was also distributed on
CDs at OpenRheinRuhr 2009, and will be (by formorer) at 26C3 in Berlin.

This is the combination of an ISO 9660 filesystem image with the
“Samhain” edition of MirBSD and the “Hello, Wien!” edition of grml GNU/Linux, Triforce (as
usual), and the „Allerheiligen“ CVS snapshot. And a tribute to UF.

Update 01.11. – This is tagged 「event」 because I
intend on distributing this snapshot on CDs at OpenRheinRuhr next weekend, and
maybe Benny on bootable tapes at 26C3…

MirGRML 2009.10 is based on grml-small 2009.10-rc3 and contains a
couple more programmes, and, as usual, is fitted to match the rest
of The MirOS Project’s offers, for instance by not using a framebuffer
by default, having mksh as login
shell, etc.This time, all (required) source code is available
either from our CVS or from sources.grml.org.

The Squash-and-Steffl background comes from Christoph Prokop, and
was used in our desktop wallpaper with permission from Mika.

Update 01.11. – The GRUB2 「memtest86+」 bootmenu
option does not work because nobody told the Grml team that it must
now be booted with 「linux16」 ipv 「linux」 – fix is to type ‘e’ to
edit the entry, move right, type the “16” and hit ^X to boot.

Note: This is “MirGRML”, a mini-Grml coming with MirBSD. There is
also “MirOS bsd4grml”, a mini-MirBSD coming with Grml. This should
clear up any possible confusion. (This snapshot contains a full MirOS
BSD, i386 and sparc, no MirOS bsd4grml, plus MirGRML, but
no Grml. The Grml 2009.10 release contains a full/medium/small
Grml, no MirGRML, plus MirOS bsd4grml (the small one).

MirOS BSD, both i486 and sparc architectures. Most recent snapshot,
compiled 2009-10-30, with an updated kernel for a security
fix from 2009-10-31 we urge people to upgrade to,
even if running older versions. Hence, MirOS-current snapshots are
now recommended over MirOS #10-RELEASE, updates for which we have
been unable to provide regularily due to lack of time. (Sorry.) This
snapshot could have been released as MirOS #11 if it were not for our
release plans (so please consider it a new stable release, albeit one
without intentions to release binary incremental security updates, but
then, we can’t do so for #10 either, so you still win).

MirBSD/i386 is called MirOS BSD/i486 above. We might produce
a MirOS BSD/i386 platform with user-space soft-float (like ARM), for a
SoC device, if we want and have the time to play with such platforms.
What is currently MirBSD/i386 requires an Intel 80486DX or compatible,
such as a Cyrix 80486DLC (the one in nwt, see my wlog entries
for details). Neither 80386 compatibles nor FPU-less systems will work
with this release.MirBSD/sparc is still compiled for v8 CPUs, with
optimisation for HyperSPARC turned on. It is possible to compile your
own variant for a v7 CPU (sun4 or sun4c system), though.

This Live CD comes with IceWM, Dillo 2 and a couple of other tools
installed and partially preconfigured (you can even run MirBSD inside
MirBSD, as qemu is shipped). Enjoy!

Update 02.11. – The /etc/rc shipped breaks
pflogd(8) and hence spamlogd(8) – part of the spamd(8) suite – please
update this file from the etc10.ngz set manually to cvs(1)revision
1.107 if you are running a spamfilter scenario. Our apologies.

Once this release is done, I will create a cpio-with-crc-ball of the
CVS repository again, for initial extraction purposes, to speed up an
rsync mirror process. It will be available from our usual web mirrors.
(Link)

You can also pull /cvs directly, and /MirOS and
/Pkgs. We plan to make all distfiles used to build
MirPorts packages available as well, but currently lack disc space on
some of the boxen involved (they are still usually available from the
original mirrors, as well as on request directly from bsiegert@/tg@,
plus we fully intend on making binary packages the viable option).